Monday, August 22, 2011

Today I reached my first milestone and finished 20% of the Chapter 2 final artwork. I spent 40 hours working on it. Normally that would have taken me over a month but with my new fulltime schedule I accomplished the first milestone in 1.5 weeks. And that's in fact longer than it should normally take. The finishing touches on the app and the upcoming digitalartconvention in Berlin (which I'm organizing) took away some time from my schedule. However, it feels great to make such fast progress on Chapter 2. I really can't wait to present it to you.

However, the next 4 weeks will hardly see any progress on Chapter 2. It's summer vacation time and my wife and I are looking forward to present little Lucas to his great-grandparents in Spain for the first time. The little rascal is starting to crawl and I'm curious to see his face when he sees a beach for the first time. Then, directly after our vacation there's the digitalartconvention, and in October the Frankfurt Book Fair will take away some days from my schedule, too. I will post details on Frankfurt as soon as I can say when exactly I will be available on the Tokyopop booth.

Well, that all combined leads to the fact that Chapter 2 will presumably not be released so much earlier than originally planned. I really didn't anticipate all the stuff that got in my way and with the app release and the book publishing ahead there's plenty of distraction still waiting for me. I'm planning to continue with Chapter 2 late September and hopefully I'll wrap up the artwork in early November. I don't quite know yet how much time editing and layout will take. For Chapter 1 that process was very tesselated and it's hard to say how long it'll take when I'm working on that part fulltime and in one stretch. There's still a lot to learn for me. I guess, Chapter 3 will be the first Chapter that I will create in a truly proven workflow.

Okay, of course I'm not leaving you without at least a small sneak peek into Chapter 2. Here's a panel from the first milestone that I really enjoyed painting. I was longing to paint forest scenes since the very beginning of my work on the Wormworld Saga and Chapter 2 fortunately has plenty of them:

Wednesday, August 17, 2011

Some of you might remember that I mentioned a journey to Graz, Austria at the beginning of July. I went there for a week and recorded a bunch of video-trainings for video2brain which is a company that offers online and DVD video-workshops. The first one (in German language) was just released. It runs for about two hours and covers all details of my digital drawing workflow. The video is not timelapsed. The full drawing process is filmed and commented in realtime. As you can see, I chose an image from the Wormworld Saga for the course:

Click to go to the product page

And there's a trailer, too:

A second video in German on digital painting will be released soon. I also recorded two video-trainings in English language which hopefully we will not have to wait for too long.

Alright, I hope that I can catch the interest of some of you with this. I will keep you informed about the following releases.

Monday, August 15, 2011

Last week I finished a task that was sitting on my to-do-list for some time now. All backers of the Wormworld Saga App kickstarer campaign who pledged $500 or $1000 receive a custom pencil drawing. The outcome of this is a nice and diverse collection of drawings that will go out into the world today (click thumbnails for a larger resolution):

These are really unique items because not only are these originals but these are the only 10 drawings with the blue Wormseal stamp that will ever exist. So, collectors: watch out for these!

If you happen to be interested in an original pencil drawing from me, you might want to consider to buy an Ultimate Fan Collection from the wormworldsaga.com print shop. A pencil drawing is part of this package.

Tuesday, August 9, 2011

"Finally!" A lot of you will say, I guess. And yes, I didn't think that it would take me so long before I could start on the next chapter of the Wormworld Saga neither. I promised fast progress the day when I announced to work fulltime on the Wormworld Saga and here we are - nearly 5 weeks later and I'm just starting with Chapter 2. I just completely underestimated the amount of work that I had to put into the app. It feels good having made the effort though. I'm really looking forward to the release as I hope a lot of you do, too. I have finished my part and now the developers are going to fix bugs and submit a version to Apple in order to get the approval for the App Store. We hope that the whole process will be completed by the end of August. The app should be landing in the App Store in early September at the latest.

So, that finally gives me the opportunity to start with the final artwork of Chapter 2. During the last two days I have reworked the preliminary version from ... April (oh God, is it really April?) and I'm now confident to say that I have landed a version that's ready to be finalized.

I'm really excited about Chapter 2! I think that it's going to be a worthy follower to Chapter 1 - with more content, more action, more dramatic turning points, and a kickass ending that will make you wanna read Chapter 3 instantly. Well, okay, let's finish Chapter 2 before we begin to talk about Chapter 3...

I've established 5 milestones again. They are 25% larger than the milestones of Chapter 1. I hope to reach the first one before my summer vacation starts. I don't dare to announce a release date for Chapter 2 yet. There's a 3 weeks vacation coming up and I'm organizing the convention of the digitalartforum again which will take place in September. In October I've got to attend the Frankfurt Book Fair. Apart from that, I'm going to concentrate on Chapter 2 though. You'll get the updates here!